I grew up on sci-fi and fantasy. It’s been my go-to for decades. I read outside the field, but my true love and escape has always been speculative fiction of one sort or another.

So when I started writing “for real” I, of course, started with speculative fiction. It’s what I knew and loved.

And when I read KKR’s Freelancer’s Guide and she suggested having a list of hard-to-achieve goals to keep you motivated, I turned to the speculative fiction field. On my dream list were winning a Campbell Award or a Hugo or Nebula someday.

I thought, how cool would that be? To write something that other readers who love speculative fiction as much as I do would love and to be recognized for it.

Well, today a group of I don’t even know what to call them, ruined that dream for me. They took a big stinking dump on the Hugo and Campbell awards. They can claim that it was about encouraging diversity and bringing to light lesser known individuals, but when you run a concerted campaign that drowns out all voices except your own that’s not what you’re doing.

They’ve hijacked the award. And put a black mark on every single title they nominated whether it has any merit or not.

And made me very, very happy that I don’t have any skin in their particular game. Because how much would it suck to be new to the field, to have written something that people loved, and to be number six on the Hugo ballot? Or the Campbell ballot? And to know that you didn’t make the final cut because a group of people campaigned to fill all the slots with their appointed nominees?